Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is a mechanism and a protocol to move data between primary storage and secondary storage. It is used by network-attached storage (“NAS”) systems to back up and/or restore data. As the capacity of data stored on NAS systems increases due to industry demand and corresponding technological advances, backing up these storage systems becomes more challenging. For example, NDMP backup sessions are single stream in that a single file system backs up to a single storage device, such as a tape drive. This can limit the efficiency of an NDMP backup, as in many cases, the backup speed is limited by the speed of the storage device that can accept data from the single NDMP stream. For example, LT05 tape drives, commonplace for backup, are limited to 140 megabytes per second without compression.
Although the amount of data to be backed up tends to increase as the capacity of a NAS system increases, in general, the backup window allotted for performing backups does not change. If the backup process is limited by both the speed of the tape drive and the time window for performing backup, network operators may have to choose between backing up all the data they desire and extending the backup window in to peak hours and possibly compete for network resources with normal network usage. Thus, there exists the need to offer more efficient backup solutions that can back up large amounts of data over smaller windows of time.